That’s it! You have now archived messages using Mac Mail. Your browser does not support the video tag. The selected mailbox will be rebuilt and messages from the server re-downloaded. You can select the entire contents of a folder by using CMD+A or using the edit menu and select all. When youre searching for email in the Macs Mail application and cant. If you’re copying messages in bulk try to limit copy operations to a few hundred emails at a time to avoid any risk of the copy operation timing out mid-transfer. You can move messages individually or in bulk. To archive messages from your IMAP mailbox you simply need to drag/drop the message from the IMAP folders to the location folder added in Mac Mail. You should now see this has been added to the folders list in Mac Mail under the heading On My Mac.

Make sure the Location for the new mailbox is set to On My Mac and enter a Name for the mailbox.

If you don’t already have a local folder for archiving mail you can create one by following these steps: Create, access and manage mail from all your emails accounts in one place. This guide will explain how to create a local folder within Mac Mail and archive messages from your IMAP mailbox to local storage on your Mac. Download Mail and enjoy it on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

This will allow you to free up space in your mailbox without permanently deleting your messages. If your IMAP mailbox is full or starting to approach the disk space capacity you may need to archive messages by copying them to an offline location on your computer.

Apple mail download folder